Ajaya Kumar Sahu is Fellow at NCAER. He is an Agricultural Economist by training. During his stay at the NCAER, he has worked on areas like poverty analysis, issues related to agriculture and rural development, labour and employment with special reference to quality of jobs and skills, public finance and analysis of price dynamics. His expertise lies in handling large scale data like NSSO micro data on employment, consumption, enterprises, agriculture, ASI data, conducting primary survey that involves sampling and weight calculations. Presently he is working on Gig economy in India and the quarterly Business Expectations Survey. He completed his M. Phil in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is presently pursuing his Ph. D in Economics from Jamia Milia Islamia. He cleared the National Eligibility Test (NET) with the Junior Research Fellowship, conducted by the UGC.
Anil K Sharma is Secretary to the Governing Body and Operations Director. He has held several positions at NCAER after joining in 1992 including the Officiating Director General in May-June 2021. He has also been the NABARD Chair Professor at NCAER; Visiting Researcher at the International Trade Division, The World Bank, Washington D.C., USA; Consultant to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris; Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Rome; and, Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila; and, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Research Institute for Agricultural Economics, Budapest, Hungary.
His main areas of research include – The WTO Agreement on Agriculture, Economic and Policy Reforms in Agriculture, Price Policy and Price Stabilization Mechanisms, Rural Credit, Rural Infrastructure and Rural Poverty. He advised the Ministry of Commerce and Industry on trade negotiations in agriculture under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and has been a member of several government and industry committees and task forces. He received his MSc and PhD in Agricultural Economics from Himachal Pradesh Agricultural University.
Shanta Devarajan is a professor of the practice of international development at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He was previously at the World Bank, where he was the senior director for Development Economics, the chief economist of the Middle East and North Africa, Africa, and South Asia regions and the Human Development Network. He was also a director of the 2004 World Development Report, Making Services Work for Poor People. Before 1991, Shanta was on the faculty of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an A. B. in mathematics from Princeton University.
Nirvikar Singh is currently Distinguished Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Center for Analytical Finance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 2010 to 2020, he held the Sarbjit Singh Aurora Chair of Sikh and Punjabi Studies at UCSC. He has previously directed the UCSC South Asian Studies Initiative. He has served as a member of the Advisory Group to the Finance Minister of India on G-20 matters, and Consultant to the Chief Economic Adviser, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He has recently served on the Expert Group on post-Covid-19 economic recovery formed by the Chief Minister of Punjab state in India. At UCSC, he has previously served as Director of the Santa Cruz Center for International Economics, Co-Director of the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, and Special Advisor to the Chancellor. In the 1990s, he organized one of the first major US conferences on Indian economic reform. He has authored over 100 research papers and co-authored or co-edited six books.
He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BSc and MSc from the London School of Economics, where he was awarded the Allyn Young Prize, Gonner Prize and Ely Devons Prize.
